Down the Rabbit Hole
by Sophia Hawkins
Summary: The Real Ghostbusters. Egon finds himself in the middle of a most unusual trip.
1. Chapter 1

Down the Rabbit Hole

"Ah---ah---AH-CHOO!"

Egon fell out of bed and wound up nearly standing on his head when he hit the floor.

"That does it," Peter said, "I'm not working with you today."

Egon lowered his legs, straightened out his nightgown and turned over onto his stomach as he tried to gather his strength to respond but he was too weak. He felt Ray and Winston each grab an arm and lift him up and help him back into bed.

"You'd better take it easy today," Ray told him, "You were doing that all night. You sound pretty sick."

"I feel like it too," Egon replied as he lay against the pillow.

That right away was a red flag to the other Ghostbusters because Egon rarely admitted to being sick.

"Well," Peter said, "On the bright side, business has been slow this week so maybe we'll get lucky and nobody will call today."

"And if they do," Ray added, "I'm sure the three of us could handle it until you're back on your feet again."

Egon groaned but otherwise didn't move or speak.

"What's going on up here? Where is everybody?" the door opened and Janine stepped in and immediately took notice that something didn't look right, "Egon, what's wrong?"

He didn't open his eyes but weakly got out, "I feel terrible."

"It's probably that new flu that's going around," Winston said, "Half the city's got it."

"Oh you poor thing!" Janine said as she fell down at his side, "Is there anything we can do for you?"

"Yes, please be quiet," Egon replied.

"That's a good idea," Ray said, "We'll get out of here and let you rest."

"If you need anything," Janine said as she turned for the door, "Just let us know."

Egon let out another groan which they took as an agreement and they one by one walked out of the room and Peter closed the door behind them. Once they had gone, Egon pulled up the covers and turned on his side. Right now he felt like what people looked like in alien movies when the invaders took over the earthlings' bodies and implanted eggs and pods in them to incubate a new alien life…then the earthling's body exploded.

"Right now," he said to himself, "That might be more pleasant than this."

As he tried to get to sleep again, he was oblivious to the little green blob that was coming in through the wall. Slimer hadn't seen Egon yet that morning and saw him still in bed. He sputtered to himself and laughed as he charged at the man. Hovering directly over Egon, Slimer poked him repeatedly, calling out, "Wakey wakey! Wakey wakey!"

Turning on his other side, Egon shooed at the spud and said to him, "Go away, Slimer, I'm not in the mood today."

Slimer grumbled to himself and tried to think of something else to get a reaction out of Egon. He grabbed at the edges of his mouth and pulled it out to a size three times of what it normally was and wiggled his tongue while his eyeballs spun around. Nothing. Determined to get some reaction out of Egon, Slimer wrapped his scrawny arms around his protruding gut like a swimmer about to do a cannonball and dove down and landed in the bed with him, his ooze seeping in through the sheets and even Egon's nightgown.

"SLIMER!"

Slimer screamed and flew along the walls as Egon tried to catch him.

"What's going on in here?" Janine asked as she opened the door and came in.

Slimer flew over her head and out the door and down the stairs, leaving just she and Egon in the room.

"Egon, you're a mess!" she said, "Are you alright?"

Sighing with defeat, Egon looked at the green slime on his hands that stretched like chewed up bubble gum when he moved and replied, "I'm alright, but now I need to take a shower."

* * *

Half an hour later, Egon emerged from the bathroom, recently showered, in a clean nightgown and carrying a bucket. He put the bucket on the floor by the bed and slipped under the new covers Janine had put on while he washed up. As far as he was concerned, tomorrow couldn't come fast enough. His head was pounding, his stomach was flipping around, he knew he wouldn't be able to keep anything down, he was hot and cold, he hadn't felt this miserable in as long as he could remember. Looking back he couldn't really recall a time when he was sick, not enough to stay in bed all day anyway.

"All the things science _has_ come up with," he grumbled to himself, "And they can't figure out what to do about a virus as common as this one. Eh…" he continued grumbling, "Crumbs."

Ooh he thought to himself, he wished he hadn't said that.

He laid down again and tried to go to sleep. He didn't remember actually falling asleep, but the next thing he knew he heard a far off voice calling his name. Then he realized it was Janine; he opened his eyes and looked up to see what she wanted.

"I went to the drugstore and got some medicine for you," she said as she uncorked a large green bottle and started pouring its contents into a spoon, "The pharmacist said to give you two tablespoons every four hours. I thought it sounded a bit excessive but I guess he knows what he's talking about."

Egon looked over at the bottle. He didn't know what it was and he'd never seen anything that looked like that before; what more he was very wary about taking any medicine he didn't know about. He opened his mouth to speak but Janine took it as a sign to shove the spoon in and spill the contents down his throat. It tasted awful but before he could protest, Janine did it again.

"What is that stuff?" he demanded to know.

"Some new medicine is all I know," she said as she put the lid back on, "The man at the counter said it should get you well in no time."

"That's a tired line in the medical business," Egon told her.

"Well whatever it is, he said it works," Janine said, "Now you try and go to sleep and I'll come up later for your next dosage."

"That's not medicine," Egon commented as Janine headed for the door, "They should market that stuff to the space program as rocket fuel."

* * *

"Egon…hey Egon, are you awake?"

Forcing his eyes to open in two narrow slits, he looked up and even without his glasses, recognized Ray standing over him.

"I'm awake now, what do you want?" he asked.

"Janine told us she got you some medicine you're supposed to take," Ray answered.

Four hours had passed already? Well maybe this wouldn't be such a terrible ordeal after all.

He sat up in bed and said as Ray poured another spoonful, "I don't know what good it'll do, all those things are is alcohol and synthetic opiates."

"Still, it's worth a try, isn't it?" Ray asked.

Egon looked from him to the spoon of green liquid. "Kill or cure, I suppose," he answered.

So he took two more spoons of the vile stuff and tried to go back to sleep. It didn't seem to be too long before he became aware of Peter's presence in the room, poking him and saying, "Egon, hey Egon, wake up! It's time to take your medicine."

Again? Egon glanced over to the windows and saw that by the angle of the sun's light, something was definitely not adding up.

"What is this stuff anyway?" Peter asked as he filled up the spoon, "It looks like one of your experiments from back in college."

All the same, he managed to force two spoons of it down Egon's throat and then seemed to disappear from the room. Egon went back to sleep, only to be awoken again by Janine who came to give him another dosage. Maybe it was his fever but something about this whole thing didn't seem to connect, he noted.

After Janine left, he went to sleep and had an unusual dream that Slimer was hovering over him, sticking the lip of a beer bottle in his mouth until the bottle was empty. After which Slimer put the bottle down and left the room, screeching and laughing to himself about something as he normally did.

A while later, Egon was somewhere between awake and asleep and he licked his lips and tasted a remainder of the medicine. Now that he was awake he wanted to find out what he had been given all day and what it was made out of. Sitting up, Egon reached over to the bedside table and grabbed the green bottle. It was then that he made two disturbing discoveries; one, there was no label on the bottle, no name, no directions, not even an ingredients tab, and the second thing he realized was that the bottle was empty.

Empty, how could that be? It was a very large bottle…oh, and then it came to him. It seemed obvious in that moment that nobody who had been up to see him had checked with anybody else to see how much medicine he'd been given that day. So every person who fed him two spoons of it thought they were the first to do so. And that dream he'd had…it hadn't been a dream at all. That's how come the bottle was empty. Egon shook his head; though his mistakes were plenty and not far between, it was hard to get mad at Slimer when he did something wrong because most errors made were when he tried to help.

Only now there was another thought racing around in Egon's mind; he had in just a few short hours been given a whole bottle of medicine that he didn't even know what was in it. What side effects would there be as a result of that? And _why_ had there been no label on the bottle? Surely the doctors and the pharmacists couldn't sell medicine without the customers knowing anything about it. He didn't feel well. And it wasn't because he was sick…all the pain from that seemed to be gone. Now it was replaced with another feeling. His head felt like it was swimming, his eyelids were heavy. Everything was started to swing from side to side and nothing seemed coherent anymore. Egon laid back against the pillow and closed his eyes, hoping it was momentary and would pass.

After a minute passed, he heard something and immediately woke up and put on his glasses. He looked around the room but didn't see anybody, or anything out of place. He couldn't tell what it was he'd heard, but in that instant he'd gotten the strange feeling that he wasn't alone.

"Slimer," he said, "I'm not amused."

But he didn't see Slimer anywhere, and he didn't hear the various, irritating noises the little vapor was prone to making. Egon pushed back the covers and slowly got to his feet. He looked around the room again and still didn't see anything weird. Then he heard a noise behind him, a quick, scuffling noise, like something moving on the ground. He turned around just in time to see the closet door slam shut. What was going on? Egon went over to the closet and turned the knob but it appeared to be stuck. He jerked the knob a few more times and the door opened; and the closet was revealed in its entirety, everything looking the same.

"What's going on here?" he asked himself.

He took one step into the closet, and then another, and though it didn't answer his question; he knew that something was off when he fell through the floor and spiraled downward into complete darkness.


	2. Chapter 2

Egon didn't know what had happened or where he was. All he knew was that his current surroundings were dark and damp; he could hear water dripping against the rocks. It seemed that he was in a cave of some sort. From a distance he could hear people talking but he couldn't see anybody. Soon he was able to make out several people walking his way but they didn't seem to notice him.

"And this is the deep cavern, everybody has one."

Peter! That was Peter leading everybody else around. But who were the others? Behind Peter were four young women who all wore name tags on their shirts. The one right behind him was named Pauline, and it was shocking what a resemblance she bore to Peter. The one behind her was Raynelle and though her hair was a bit longer she was a dead ringer for Ray. Behind her was a bigger girl named Jewell who stood a good foot over the others and looked like she might have some of Winston's genes in her. And bringing up the rear was a tall lanky four eyed girl with a big head of blonde hair whose name tag read Benjamina. Now what in the world was Peter up to, leading some kind of tour?

"Anybody tells you they don't have water on the brain, don't believe them," Peter told the girls, "It doesn't matter if it's not on it because it's _in_ it. The human brain is made up of 80% water and this one is no exception. It figures, I always thought his ideas were all washed up."

Jewell stopped and looked to the side wall and saw a dent high up from the ground.

"What's that?" she asked, "A skull fracture?"

Peter turned around and saw what she and the others saw.

"Oh this?" he asked, "Well this, girls, is the infamous spot where your uncle Egon tried to drill a hole through his head when he was in college…"

"What for?" Benjamina asked.

"Who knows?"

"Too good for the Leap of Faith, was he?" Pauline asked, "Had to go and find something crazier to do."

"And can you believe that he made this attempt when he was sober?" Peter asked, "He's always been sober, his weirdness knocked every other nut in college out of the water. Now," Peter led them up a path to an area where there rested many large filing cabinets, "This is the memory bank. Everything that he has ever seen in his life is in these drawers."

To prove his point, Peter opened one of the drawers and pulled it out. It was filled with thousands of photographs; he reached in and pulled out a handful and flipped through them.

"Let's see, here's when he passed the freshman psychology course, this is when he got his thesis printed in the university's paper, here's…whoops!" Peter took out of the batch a picture with a black border, looking like Egon saw the contents of the picture through a half open eye. It revealed Peter in their dorm room looming over Egon with a bottle of shaving cream and a pink highlighter marker. Chuckling nervously, Peter ripped the picture to pieces and said, "That's one fraternity prank he'll never remember."

Raynelle looked up at the ceiling and asked, "Are there any bats in here?"

"That would be suiting," Peter said, "Having bats in the belfry, but I can assure that there are no…"

At that time, Ray came running out of another cavern swinging his arms in the air yelling, "Bats! Bats! Bats!"

The ceiling became black as hundreds of bats swarmed overhead. Everybody got near the ground and covered their heads.

"I knew it suited Egon too well not to be possible," Peter grumbled to himself.

When the bats cleared, everything else was gone. Egon couldn't figure out what had happened, what was going on or where he had gotten to this time. It was still dark and it looked like a small room roughly the size of a closet. He didn't see any doors or any way to get out. He took one step forward, nothing happened, then another, and still nothing happened. Feeling confident, he took a third step and he fell through the floor again. This time when the bottom fell out, he found himself falling downwards over the middle of the ocean.

He hit the water easier than he'd anticipated, and immediately took in a mouthful of the seawater. The first thing he noted was that it wasn't salty; it tasted just like the water that came out of a spigot on a house. Pulling his head up, he spit it out and tried to figure out where he was. The water was jumping with waves and it was a struggle to stay above the surface. Looking around he saw the water was starting to grow foamy as millions of bubbles came out of nowhere and stayed on the top of the water. He felt something jerk his foot and he sank beneath the surface and on his way down he noticed the bubbles were growing underwater too. The current scenery looked like he'd fallen into somebody's giant glass of Alka-Seltzer.

Egon swam towards the water's surface again and when he reached it he tried to jump out of the water. He succeeded, but only for a few seconds before falling on the surface again. Only this time when he landed, he didn't sink, he bounced. It was as though he had landed on a giant trampoline; he went zooming up into the air and came crashing back down. He hit one of the waves and went up in the air again. The water was no longer flowing and the waves were no longer treading up and down. Everything had stopped and the waves only moved when he fell on them. Now it seemed the entire ocean had turned into a batch of blue Jell-o.

"This can't be happening," he said to himself, and it became a mantra for him as he kept going into the air when he landed on the water, "This can't be happening, this can't be happening, this can't be happening, this…"

When he was up in the air again and looked down he saw that there was a hole in the gelatin water directly beneath him and a large sawfish had poked its large snout upward.

"This _is_ happening!" he realized with terror filling his whole body.

He hit the water and fell beneath the surface again. When he opened his eyes he found himself in a dark cavern again; this time there appeared to be a small body of water in the middle of the ground. Aside from the water dripping off the stalactites, he heard another noise off in the distance. Soon he got his answer as to what it was as he saw Slimer appear in the middle of the air in a rowboat. He rowed the oars around and sang as he floated above the water and made his way down the flowing stream.

"Row row row your boat gently down the stream, if you see a crocodile, don't forget to scream," and on that note he let out a long and loud high pitched shrill. He continued rowing and all went smoothly until something passing by in the water beneath him cut off the edge of one oar. Slimer screamed again and pulled the oar out and held it over his head. When he saw the unknown fish move by in the water again he tried hitting it with the oar and smashed it repeatedly into the water, never managing to hit his target.

Suddenly the water started to gush forward and Egon found himself floating down the tunnel. Up ahead he saw light pouring in through what had to have been the way out. When he passed through the opening in the cavern he realized he wasn't out of the woods yet because the stream of water that was flowing forth was heading for a waterfall. Egon screamed as he went over the edge and fell towards the bottom. Only when he landed, he landed in shallow water that was only about two feet deep and he was able to stand up and walk onto the shore.

The hot sand pinched at the soles of his feet as he walked along, trying to figure out where he was now.

"Uh, hello?" he called out, "Is there anybody here? Hello?"

He felt something rough under his feet and he looked down and realized he'd walked onto a set of railroad tracks.

"Train tracks on the beach?" he asked himself, wondering about it all.

As he was pondering this, he heard the 'whoo-whoo' of an oncoming train. Turning around he saw it heading his way and he jumped off the tracks just in time to see the cab of a train speed by and Egon saw through the cab's window, Peter at the front as the conductor.

"Hey, Egon!" Peter called out the window as he passed by.

Egon slapped himself in the face with disbelief, "What the…"

He heard another engine from above and he looked up and ducked down just in time as Winston passed by overhead in a motor boat.

"Watch it, Egon," Winston told him.

Now Egon was starting to worry he was losing his mind. He knew that it was physically, logically, and scientifically impossible for a motor boat to function in midair, and yet…

"Look out, Egon!"

He didn't even want to know what Ray was operating. But still he turned around and did so just in time to see Ray zoom by in a dune buggy.

"Hop in!" Ray told him.

It went against his better judgment but Egon did. He jumped over the side of the vehicle and slipped in the passenger seat as they sped away.

"I've always wanted to drive one of these," Ray said.

"Ray," Egon said, hoping to get some insight as to what had happened, "What's going on?"

Ray looked at him in complete bewilderment. But then again, Egon remembered, that's how Ray usually looked at people.

"What do you mean?" he asked.

Egon felt his eyes widen when he heard that. What did he mean? Let's recap, he had fallen through his closet, seen Venkman give a tour of his brain, nearly drowned in a glass of bicarbonate soda, did the high jump on the ocean surface, and now…

Now the road was very bumpy. Egon and Ray looked forward and saw they were driving down a slanted rocky path.

"Ray!" Egon screamed as he bounced up and down in the buggy as they tread downhill, "Stop this thing!"

"I'm trying," Ray told him.

They reached the bottom and ran into a large rock in the middle of the road that flipped the buggy into the air and Egon and Ray fell out of it and landed on the ground. But they didn't stop when they landed, they skidded on what should have been a level pathway; and yet they skidded as if they were still moving downhill.

Egon felt the ground beneath him turn hard instead of the sand and gravel. It looked solid so he took a chance on standing up and just when he had gotten himself straightened out, he heard a strange noise coming from behind and then…

"You're it!"

One of the girls from the tour slapped him hard on the arm as she accelerated by on roller skates.

"What's 'it'?" Egon asked himself.

"What's what?" another girl asked as she zipped by and hit Egon on the arm as well.

"Who said what?" Egon heard Peter ask from somewhere off in the distance.

"Say what?" Winston asked.

"Are we going to go through this again?" Egon asked himself.

"Go through what again?" the third girl asked as she skated by and hit Egon as well.

"Who did it?" Peter asked.

"Did what?" Winston asked.

"Said what," Peter answered.

"What?" Ray asked.

"Exactly," Peter said.

"Who said 'exactly'?" Ray asked.

"Nobody said 'exactly'," Winston told him.

"Then why'd you say they did?" Ray asked.

"Who said?" Winston asked.

"Who's on first," Ray said.

"What's first?" Peter asked.

"No, what's second."

"I don't know!" Peter said.

"He's on third," Ray told him.

"I don't know what you're talking about, and I don't care!" Peter about exploded.

"What was that, Peter?"

"I said I DON'T CARE!"

"That's the shortstop," Ray said.

Peter screamed through gritted teeth and tried ripping his hair out.

"When did we get stuck in an Abbott and Costello movie?" the fourth girl asked as she too zoomed by on skates and tagged Egon. He was certain by tomorrow his shoulder would be covered in bruises.

"Heeey everybody!" the first girl, the one named Pauline said as she slowed down and turned around on her skates, "It's time to crack the whip!"

"To do what?" Egon asked.

He felt somebody jerk his arm and the next thing he knew he was being swung around in a circle. After a few times around he was too dizzy to clearly see anything but he did see everybody on roller skates going around in one long chain with him at the end, and a realization came to him.

"Uh-oh," he said to himself as he knew what was going to come next.

Out of nowhere he felt himself being lifted off the ground and violently thrown across the room, or wherever they were. He went flying through the air and he saw a wall straight ahead that any way he calculated it, would be impossible to miss hitting face first.


End file.
